Fathers and Sons and the Mets

On Sunday afternoon, I will head out to Coney Island. It is opening weekend for the Brooklyn Cyclones. They sponsor my son’s Little League and have invited everyone from the preschool Pee-Wees to the teens in the Freshmen Division to play catch on the field with their fathers before the game.

The Cyclones are the only branch of the Mets’ farm system that is accessible by subway (there are days when there seems to be another one at the end of the 7 line), but we will be driving since my father is joining us and the stadium will present him with enough stairs for one day. My father will turn eighty next week. He still goes out two or three times a week, to concerts and the theatre, but he doesn’t bother with sporting events anymore. I might be taking my father to his last baseball game.

My father took me to my first baseball game. It was 1976, the year I turned six, the age my son is now. My father grew up in Queens, a New York Giants fan, and we went to see the Mets. Shea Stadium was covered with blue and orange shingles back then, and the best way to order tickets was to submit proofs of purchase from Dairylea milk. Jerry Koosman pitched, a complete game if I’m not mistaken. The Mets won. I stood up and cheered as the lights on the old scoreboard spelled out KOOS.

The next fifteen times I went to Shea, the Mets lost. The following year, the team sent Tom Seaver and all hope to Cincinnati. Their next winning season would be 1984, by which time my devotion to the Mets had set like concrete. In the meantime, the Yankees won two World Series and made it to a third, but they had a cruel, impulsive, free-spending owner in George Steinbrenner and a revolving door. The Mets were frugal and lovably bad. Those fifteen consecutive defeats have more to do with my attachment as that initial victory, maybe fifteen times more. And those losses intensified the joy of the 1986 World Series, like a drink at the oasis after a long trek across the desert.

The Cyclones stadium is smaller than the Mets’ new home. It is friendlier, and easier to get to from our house. Tickets are inexpensive enough and the outcome sufficiently inconsequential that I would be fine surrendering to a four-year-old who wants to eat or wander or go home after two innings. And just as Angel Pagan, Ike Davis, and Dillon Gee stopped in Coney Island on their way to Willetts Point, budding baseball fans would make the natural progression to rooting for the Mets. Such was the rationale for taking my son to his first game there. It turned out that the outcome was consequential: ask my son which team he roots for, and he says the Cyclones—and the Yankees.

My son’s support for the Yankees has caused a crisis of sorts, the way another child’s plea for a Christmas tree can inspire even atheistic Jewish parents to go to synagogue. Could I have done more to prevent his apostasy? Last April, after we signed my son up for Little League, I went to buy him his first leather glove and metal bat. I also needed to pick up a birthday present for his friend, and that preschooler came from a devout Mets household, so I got a Johan Santana T-shirt. I almost brought home a second size small, but I hesitated. It wasn’t about Santana—this was before the Mets’ ace was accused of sexual assault. (He was never charged with a crime.) My ambivalence about the Mets is broader than that. With a major-market payroll, they are no longer lovable when they lose but expensive embarrassments. The Wilpons have a lot to answer for, as my colleague Jeff Toobin explained recently, and maybe things would be different in my house if they had named their local A team the Brooklyn Mets. (Their opponents on Sunday will be the Staten Island Yankees. Their stadium has a spectacular view of New York Harbor. I went once, for a cricket match.) Yet I can’t stop caring about the Mets or baseball, as my father did. The news of Gary Carter’s inoperable brain tumors almost moved me to tears, and the prospect of David Einhorn succeeding the Wilpons gives me hope.

Another complication is that my son likes to win and likes teams that win. Last summer’s World Cup was the first major sporting event that he kept up with like a fan. We reenacted it daily, one on one. He played as the U.S. until they lost to Ghana, and the U.S. became my role for a few days, until Ghana lost to Uruguay. Now he is Spain when we play soccer and I must be the Netherlands, and I expect this will continue until 2014. Likewise, he noticed that the Yankees made the post-season last year and have been fighting for first place in the AL East, while the Mets fizzled in 2010 and are struggling to break .500.

Rooting for a losing team has been character-building, or so I tell myself, but identifying with winners must have psychological benefits, too. And one father I know pointed out that life is hard enough without having to root for a bad team. Most friends say, however, that I’m not doing enough to steer my son toward the Mets. One of them, a Yankees fan whose bank-card PIN commemorates Bucky Dent’s home run in the one-game playoff against the Red Sox, called my ambivalence an abrogation of my paternal responsibilities, a form of negligence that was almost criminal.

For a professional consultation, I called up Daniel Wann, a professor of psychology at Murray State University, in Kentucky. Wann is the lead author of papers such as “An Exploratory Examination of the Factors Influencing the Origination, Continuation, and Cessation of Identification with Sports Teams” (1996) and the co-creator of the Sport Spectator Identification Scale. He’s also the father of two teen-age boys, and a lifelong fan of the Kansas City Royals and Chicago Cubs—”so I have more character than anybody,” he told me.

“It’s hard to blame a kid for picking a team that wins,” Wann told me. He also said that there’s still time for my son to change his mind. “For kids, just like it is for anything, their perception of the world is still forming, but you can potentially see fluctuations.”

Wann and his colleagues have studied how people become fans in the United States and abroad. And in every country from Australia to Norway, he said, “the most powerful influence was wielded by that fan’s father. It’s not the only influence—schools matter, coaches matter—but the biggest influence is the father.” (Not everyone has a father, of course, let alone a father who’s also a fan.) Wann wielded his influence; his own sons also like the Royals and Cubs, but mostly they like college basketball, and despite living in Kentucky they support their father’s Kansas Jayhawks. “There are very few experiences that I’ve had with my boys that have been more enjoyable than rooting for the same team,” he said. Wann advised me to use whatever kind of guile I can come up with to make my son a Mets fan.

My son and I have been to Citi Field twice so far, and his motions to go to Yankee Stadium keep getting tabled. When a classmate’s father asked what my son would like for his birthday, I said that he’d love a Mets shirt, and he proudly wears David Wright’s number, 5. We’ve been watching the Mets on television. They don’t make it easy. In the rubber game of the subway series, we watched the Mets bullpen blow a 3-1 lead and give up eight runs in the seventh inning. Last night, we turned on the game on just as the Braves’ Chipper Jones was rounding the bases after a three-run homer, his forty-seventh against the Mets. My son said he wasn’t upset, since he likes the Yankees. This morning, I left the Times open to the full page about Jose Reyes’s comeback, with four big color photos, and didn’t bring up that the Braves won in ten innings, due to a balk from the same bullpen.

So I’m fighting to change his mind, but I’m also trying to come to peace with the possibility that my son will be a Yankees fan. Better than than a fair-weather fan, or so I tell myself; independence and loyalty are traits worth cultivating. And, to be fair, the Mets haven’t earned his support.

I still believe that rooting for a losing team builds character, but not to worry: my son has followed my lead on the Knicks.